As snark goes, I must admit, the new DNC ad contemptuous of Mitt Romney's plan to take an economic knife to Big Bird is pretty funny. It is right out of the Alinsky's Rules For Radicals - "ridicule is man's most potent weapon."
Ridicule is designed to communicate to the listener that the object ridiculed is not worthy of any serious consideration. So will that backfire on the left in this instance? Lord knows it should. The deficit is among the top concerns for voters. And at the debate, 70 million people heard Romney seriously address the issue:
[Our $16 trillion deficit is] not just an economic issue, I think it's a moral issue. I think it's, frankly, not moral for my generation to keep spending massively more than we take in, knowing those burdens are going to be passed on to the next generation and they're going to be paying the interest and the principal all their lives.
And the amount of debt we're adding, at a trillion a year, is simply not moral.
So how do we deal with it?
. . . [F]irst of all, I will eliminate all programs by this test, if they don't pass it: Is the program so critical it's worth borrowing money from China to pay for it? And if not, I'll get rid of it. Obamacare's on my list. . . .
I'm sorry, Jim, I'm going to stop the subsidy to PBS. I'm going to stop other things. I like PBS, I love Big Bird. Actually like you, too. But I'm not going to -- I'm not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for. . .
Romney's point was not that he would make cutting PBS a central part of his plan to reduce the deficit, which is what the Obama now wants everyone to believe. Rather it was that Romney's cuts would be so far reaching and disciplined that they would even encompass PBS.
Yet Obama has latched onto Big Bird with a death grip - yes, he is choking that chicken. The Weekly Standard notes "that in the last few days, Obama has mentioned Big Bird eight times, and Elmo five--and Libya not at all." Big Bird is now central to Obama's narrative, and if you have seen Obama talk about Big Bird over the past few days, you've seen him having a lot of fun with it. It is right in his wheelhouse.
No single ad that I have seen to date so well encapsulates all that is wrong with Obama and the far left. They are demagoguing Romney's promise to cut all non-critical programs. If anyone who sees this ad thinks about it for a minute, they should walk away with a damning indictment of Obama. And if Obama wants to play the Big Bird card at the debate, Romney should make him eat that bird, feathers and all.
Romney should ask whether anyone thinks that our deficit, $16 trillion and growing at over a trillion dollars a year under Obama, is a subject for humor, one to be brushed off with ridicule? If we can't touch all non-critical funding - including PBS subsidies - when we have a $16 trillion deficit, then what that makes crystal clear is that the left is simply not serious about addressing the deficit.
Obama and the DNC might have outdone themselves this time. They have created a Big Bird trap that they themselves are standing in.
Back in 2008, Obama said that, “if you don’t have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from. You make a big election about small things.”
Obama is finally figuring out that the November 2010 elections meant something. Americans can see the direction of our country - and its running fast and furious towards an economic cliff. Obama tried ignoring it with his 2011 Budget and insane SOTU speech. In stark contrast, Rep. Paul Ryan recently released a budget proposal to deal honestly with our problems. Obama tried to respond today - with a speech of course, not a serious budget proposal. Here is the summary of that speech:
The debt and deficit is Bush's fault. Republican's budget plan is "E"-vil. It will destroy our nation's infrastructure, toss grandmothers into the street, take away their health care, and take candy from babies. WE (the royal "we") will bring fiscal sanity to America by gutting our military and raising taxes on the rich and corporations. WE will also increase spending and leave untouched all benefits for social security and medicare. All of this will magically reduce the deficit by trillions.
Add a ton of intellectually dishonest demagoguery and announce a new panel with Joe the Clown in charge and that is it a nutshell. Obama is more dangerously incompetent than Homer Simpson working at a nuke plant.
Update: Krauthammer offers his take on the scurrilous performance by Obama:
Jake Tapper at Political Punch notes this contrast in intellectual honesty from one of Obama's prior speeches to today's:
President Obama at the GOP House retreat, January 2010:
“We're not going to be able to do anything about any of these entitlements if what we do is characterize whatever proposals are put out there as, ‘Well, you know, that's -- the other party's being irresponsible. The other party is trying to hurt our senior citizens. That the other party is doing X, Y, Z.”
President Obama today:
“One vision has been championed by Republicans in the House of Representatives and embraced by several of their party’s presidential candidates…This is a vision that says up to 50 million Americans have to lose their health insurance in order for us to reduce the deficit. And who are those 50 million Americans? Many are someone’s grandparents who wouldn’t be able afford nursing home care without Medicaid. Many are poor children. Some are middle-class families who have children with autism or Down’s syndrome. Some are kids with disabilities so severe that they require 24-hour care. These are the Americans we’d be telling to fend for themselves.”
One word that will never be appended to Obama when history is written is "leadership." My only question is whether we will still be able to fix our country post 2012, or whether Obama and the left have set us on a permanent progressive course to ruin.
“When the President reached out to ask us to attend his speech, we were expecting an olive branch. Instead, his speech was excessively partisan, dramatically inaccurate, and hopelessly inadequate to address our fiscal crisis. What we heard today was not fiscal leadership from our commander-in-chief; we heard a political broadside from our campaigner-in-chief.
“Last year, in the absence of a serious budget, the President created a Fiscal Commission. He then ignored its recommendations and omitted any of its major proposals from his budget, and now he wants to delegate leadership to yet another commission to solve a problem he refuses to confront.
“We need leadership, not a doubling down on the politics of the past. By failing to seriously confront the most predictable economic crisis in our history, this President’s policies are committing our children to a diminished future. We are looking for bipartisan solutions, not partisan rhetoric. When the President is ready to get serious about confronting this challenge, we'll be here.”
Update: Ryan's office highlights "key facts" from Obama's speech:
· Counts unspecified savings over 12 years, not the 10-year window by which serious budget proposals are evaluated.
· Postpones all savings until 2013 – after his reelection campaign.
· Runs away from the Fiscal Commission’s recommendations on Social Security – puts forward no specific ideas or even a process to force action.
Update: The full comments from Paul Ryan on video -
Charles Krauthammer has read the proposed budget and gives us his bill of particulars:
. . . The budget touts a deficit reduction of $1.1 trillion over the next decade.
Where to begin? Even if you buy this number, Obama’s budget adds $7.2 trillion in new debt over that same decade.
But there’s a catch. The administration assumes economic-growth levels higher than private economists and the Congressional Budget Office predict. Without this rosy scenario — using CBO growth estimates — $1.7 trillion of revenue disappears and U.S. debt increases $9 trillion over the next decade. This is almost $1 trillion every year.
Assume you buy the rosy scenario. Of what does this $1.1 trillion in deficit reduction consist? Painful cuts? Think again. It consists of $1.6 trillion in tax hikes, plus an odd $328 billion of some mysterious bipartisan funding for a transportation trust fund (gas taxes, one supposes) — for a grand total of nearly $2 trillion in new taxes.
Classic Obama debt reduction: Add $2 trillion in new taxes, then add another $1 trillion in new spending and, presto, you’ve got $1 trillion of debt reduction. It’s the same kind of mad deficit accounting in Obamacare: It reduces debt by adding $540 billion in new spending, then adding $770 billion in new taxes. Presto: $230 billion of “debt reduction.” . . .
And what of those “painful cuts” Obama is making to programs he really cares about? The catch is that these “cuts” are from a hugely inflated new baseline created by the orgy of spending in Obama’s first two years. These were supposedly catastrophe-averting, anti-Depression emergency measures. But post-recession they remain in place. As a result, discretionary non-defense budget levels today are 24 percent higher than before Obama — 84 percent higher if you add in the stimulus money.
Which is why the supposedly painful cuts yield spending still at stratospheric levels. After all the cuts, Department of Education funding for 2012 remains 35 percent higher than in the last pre-emergency pre-Obama year, 2008. Environmental Protection Agency: 18 percent higher. Department of Energy: 22 percent higher. Consider even the biggest “painful cut” headline of all, the 50 percent cut in fuel subsidies for the poor. Barbaric, is it not? Except for the fact that the subsidies had been doubled from 2008 levels. The draconian cut is nothing but a return to normal pre-recession levels.
Yet all this is penny-ante stuff. The real money is in entitlements. And the real scandal of this budget is that Obama doesn’t touch them. Not Social Security. Not Medicaid. Not Medicare.
What about tax reform, the other major recommendation of the deficit commission? Nothing.
How about just a subset of that — corporate tax reform, on which Republicans have signaled they are eager to collaborate? The formula is simple: Eliminate the loopholes to broaden the tax base, then lower the rates for everyone, promoting both fairness and economic efficiency. What does the Obama budget do? Removes tax breaks — and then keeps the rate at 35 percent, among the highest in the industrialized world (more than twice Canada’s, for example).
Yet for all its gimmicks, this budget leaves the country at decade’s end saddled with publicly held debt triple what Obama inherited.
A more cynical budget is hard to imagine. This one ignores the looming debt crisis, shifts all responsibility for serious budget-cutting to the Republicans — for which Democrats are ready with a two-year, full-artillery demagogic assault — and sets Obama up perfectly for re-election in 2012. . . .
Whatever Obama may be, and I can think of numerous words and phrases to describe him, the words "leader" and "patriot" are not among their number. That is too bad, given his job description.
Interest payments on the national debt will quadruple in the next decade and every man, woman and child in the United States will be paying more than $2,500 a year to cover for the nation's past profligacy, according to figures in President Obama's new budget plan.
Starting in 2014, net interest payments will surpass the amount spent on education, transportation, energy and all other discretionary programs outside defense. In 2018, they will outstrip Medicare spending. Only the amounts spent on defense and Social Security would remain bigger under the president's plan.
Past profligacy. In 2006, the total budget deficit was $8.5 trillion. Since Pelosi, Reid, and then Obama took control, they have come within striking distance of doubling that debt. And Obama's WTF budget, which does nothing to address entitlements or this looming interest bomb, would lead us to the precipice of ruin. To think that America elected this man in response to a fiscal crisis is going to go down as one of the great ironies in history. To quote Instapundit, in commenting on this article:
AND REMEMBER, THIS IS THE ROSY SCENARIO: . . . Honestly, the past couple of years have shown a degree of criminal irresponsibility on the part of our political class — and particularly of this administration and its Congressional allies — that I wouldn’t have thought possible even a few years ago, cynical as I am. It’s been a perfect storm of greed, shortsightedness, and arrogance.
WSJ: "This was supposed to be the moment we were all waiting for. After three years of historic deficits that have added almost $4.5 trillion to the national debt, President Obama was finally going to get serious about fiscal discipline. Instead, what landed on Congress's doorstep on Monday was a White House budget that increases deficits above the spending baseline for the next two years. Hosni Mubarak was more in touch with reality last Thursday night."
Excitable Andy: "[Senators] have to lead, because this president is too weak, too cautious, too beholden to politics over policy to lead. In this budget, in his refusal to do anything concrete to tackle the looming entitlement debt, in his failure to address the generational injustice, in his blithe indifference to the increasing danger of default, he has betrayed those of us who took him to be a serious president prepared to put the good of the country before his short term political interests. Like his State of the Union, this budget is good short term politics but such a massive pile of fiscal bullshit it makes it perfectly clear that Obama is kicking this vital issue down the road. To all those under 30 who worked so hard to get this man elected, know this: he just screwed you over."
Hot Air - Obama's budget "surreal and catastrophic." "On the seminal issue of his time, the long-term fiscal sustainability of the United States, this guy has completely abdicated."
Nice Deb: Obama Says Fiscal Commission “Provides Framework For Conversation” While Rejecting All Of Its Recommendations
Jake Tapper: Obama has proposed a "10-year budget plan that would increase the national debt by $7.2 trillion over 10 years -- $1.1 trillion less than if it weren't implemented. The plan shows that Obama will not take the lead on any aggressive measure to eliminate the nation’s $14 trillion debt . . ."
Instapundit: HOW DEEP ARE THOSE PROPOSED SPENDING CUTS? NOT VERY. “The next time you hear howls of anguish over deep, tough, painful cuts in the federal budget, you might want to ask yourself how you’d feel if you had 7 percent more to spend next year than you did last year.”
And among the accompanying graphics, the one on spending as a percentage of GDP should undercut any claims that Obama is just continuing Bush’s big-spending ways. Bush spent big. Obama is spending disastrously big.
Dana Milbank: "Obama's budget proposal is a remarkably weak and timid document. He proposes to cut only $1.1 trillion from federal deficits over the next decade - a pittance when you consider that the deficit this year alone is in the neighborhood of $1.5 trillion. The president makes no serious attempt at cutting entitlement programs that threaten to drive the government into insolvency."
NRO: "First, there’s the $1.6 trillion deficit. That figure is the same as the entire budget of the United States in FY1998 (FY1986 in real terms, which is interesting considering the tendency to compare Obama with Reagan).
Powerline: "Obama's game is transparent, isn't it? He is playing a game of chicken. He puts forward a series of proposals that he knows are more or less insane; but he also believes that Republicans will come to his rescue. They, not being wholly irresponsible, will come up with plans to reform entitlements--like, for example, the Ryan Roadmap. Ultimately, some combination of those plans will be implemented because the alternative is the collapse, not just of the government of the United States, but of the country itself. But Obama thinks the GOP's reforms will be unpopular, and he will be able to demagogue them, thus having his cake and eating it too. Is that leadership? Of course not. But it is the very essence of Barack Obama."
At best, Obama is a deeply ideological man with almost no grasp of reality. At worst, he is a cynical, manipulative politician willing to put his political interests above the best interests of the nation.
He appeared on Hardball to discuss the Bush Tax Cuts and plans to put our economy back on a fiscally sane path. Matthews did a hyper-aggressive interview with Ryan and Ryan shined.
Rep. Joe Crowley of NY also appeared on the show - and was about as far out of his element as he could be. His answer to our economic milaise was to tout the Democrats Pay-Go legislation. The problem of course is the left has that new law encased under glass, only to be brought out to wave around on camera before the mid-terms. Matthews didn't push Crowley at all, but its just as well as that gave more time for Ryan.
Let us be honest. The US is still trapped in depression a full 18 months into zero interest rates, quantitative easing (QE), and fiscal stimulus that has pushed the budget deficit above 10% of GDP.
The share of the US working-age population with jobs in June actually fell from 58.7% to 58.5%. This is the real stress indicator. The ratio was 63% three years ago. Eight million jobs have been lost.
The average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks. Nothing like this has been seen before in the post-war era. . . .
"Legions of individuals have been left with stale skills, and little prospect of finding meaningful work, and benefits that are being exhausted. By our math the crop of people who are unemployed but not receiving a check amounts to 9.2m."
. . . With significantly lower revenues and higher outlays, debt would reach 87 percent of GDP by 2020, CBO projects. After that, the growing imbalance between revenues and noninterest spending, combined with spiraling interest payments, would swiftly push debt to unsustainable levels. Debt as a share of GDP would exceed its historical peak of 109 percent by 2025 and would reach 185 percent in 2035.
The CBO warns of potentially devastating consequence for the United States if this debt mountain is not tackled, and even points out that its “projections understate the severity of the long-term budget problem because they do not incorporate the significant negative effects that accumulating substantial amounts of additional federal debt would have on the economy” . . .
With his reckless big government policies, Barack Obama threatens to run his country into the ground, with American decline the inevitable end result. . . .
We are in a recession - if not a depression - that finally came to the fore in 2007 after two decades of Democrat social engineering of our financial sector. And we today are still in a recession - if not a depression - because of the election of a President who is deeply anti-business and who has demonized the profit motive. Indeed, it is those, along with his twin drives to socialize our economy and empower unions which have been the defining features of Obama's nearly eighteen months in office. Well, those four in addition to world record profligate spending. And on the horizon, Obama promises us massive new taxes ("don't read my lips"). Moreover, the centerpiece of his proposed financial regulations is to reinstall the same social engineering into our financial sector that led to our current economic mess in the first place. For the sake of brevity, I will stop my list there.
And yet now, Obama, in advance of November, is trying to convince America that he is not anti-business. According to Obama, all problems are the result of Republicans, he is struggling mightily to correct the situation (pay no attention to his projections in January 2009 that promised solutions if we immediately passed the Stimulus), and that he is a friend of business, both large and small. All of that is at least as outlandish as it would have been for Bill Clinton, during his last year in office, to try to convince America that he had always been deeply committed to monogamy.
You’d think the well-heeled and enlightened eggheads at the Aspen Ideas Festival . . . would be receptive to an intellectually ambitious president with big ideas of his own.
In a way, the folks attending this cerebral conclave pairing the Aspen Institute think tank with the Atlantic Monthly magazine might even be seen as President Obama’s natural base.
Apparently not so much.
“The real problem we have,” Mort Zuckerman said, “are some of the worst economic policies in place today that, in my judgment, go directly against the long-term interests of this country.” . . .
“If you’re asking if the United States is about to become a socialist state, I’d say it’s actually about to become a European state, with the expansiveness of the welfare system and the progressive tax system like what we’ve already experienced in Western Europe,” Harvard business and history professor Niall Ferguson declared during Monday’s kickoff session, offering a withering critique of Obama’s economic policies, which he claimed were encouraging laziness.
“The curse of longterm unemployment is that if you pay people to do nothing, they’ll find themselves doing nothing for very long periods of time,” Ferguson said. “Long-term unemployment is at an all-time high in the United States, and it is a direct consequence of a misconceived public policy.”
Ferguson was joined in his harsh attack by billionaire real estate mogul and New York Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman. Both lambasted Obama’s trillion-dollar deficit spending program—in the name of economic stimulus to cushion the impact of the 2008 financial meltdown—as fiscally ruinous, potentially turning America into a second-rate power.
“We are, without question, in a period of decline, particularly in the business world,” Zuckerman said. “The real problem we have…are some of the worst economic policies in place today that, in my judgment, go directly against the long-term interests of this country.”
Zuckerman added that he detects in the Obama White House “hostility to the very kinds of [business] culture that have made this the great country that it is and was. I think we have to find some way of dealing with that or else we will do great damage to this country with a public policy that could ruin everything.”
Ferguson added: “The critical point is if your policy says you’re going run a trillion-dollar deficit for the rest of time, you’re riding for a fall…Then it really is goodbye.” A dashing Brit, Ferguson added: “Can I say that, having grown up in a declining empire, I do not recommend it. It’s just not a lot of fun actually—decline.”
Ferguson called for what he called “radical” measures. “I can’t emphasize strongly enough the need for radical fiscal reform to restore the incentives for work and remove the incentives for idleness.” He praised “really radical reform of the sort that, for example, Paul Ryan [the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee] has outlined in his wonderful ‘Roadmap’ for radical, root-and-branch reform not only of the tax system but of the entitlement system” and “unleash entrepreneurial innovation.” Otherwise, Ferguson warned: “Do you want to be a kind of implicit part of the European Union?
This was greeted by hearty applause from a crowd that included Barbra Streisand and her husband James Brolin. “Depressing, but fantastic,” Streisand told me afterward, rendering her verdict on the session. “So exciting. Wonderful!”
Brolin’s assessment: “Mind-blowing.”
What does it say when even rabid lefties Brolin and Steisand start to think that you are too far to the left and are leading us into economic Armageddon?
The reality is that what Zuckerman and Ferguson point out is apparent to very many Americans. On a similar note, Wayne Allen Root colorfully described the situation in his column in the Las Vegas Review-Journal:
The current occupant of the White House claims to know how to create jobs. He claims jobs have been created. But so far the score is Great Obama Depression 2.2 million lost jobs, Obama 0 -- a blowout.
Obama is as hopeless, helpless, clueless and bankrupt of good ideas as the manager of the Chicago Cubs in late September. This "community organizer" knows as much about private-sector jobs as Pamela Anderson knows about nuclear physics.
It's time to call Obama what he is: The Great Jobs Killer. With his massive spending and tax hikes -- rewarding big government and big unions, while punishing taxpayers and business owners -- Obama has killed jobs, he has killed motivation to create new jobs, he has killed the motivation to invest in new businesses, or expand old ones. With all this killing, Obama should be given the top spot on the FBI's Most Wanted List.
Meanwhile, he has kept the union workers of GM and Chrysler employed (with taxpayer money). He has made sure that most government employee union members got their annual raises for sleeping on the job (with taxpayer money). He made sure that his voters got handouts mislabeled as "tax cuts" even though they never paid taxes (with taxpayer money). And he made sure that major campaign contributors collected billions off government stimulus (with taxpayer money).
As far as the taxpayers -- the people who actually take risks with our own money to create small businesses and jobs and pay most of the taxes -- we require protection under the Endangered Species Act. . . .
The days of believing the Obama propaganda about a jobs recovery are over. The trillion-dollar corporate handouts (neatly named "stimulus") may have kept big business in the money for the past 18 months, and artificially propped up the stock market, but small business is the real canary in the coal mine.
My small business-owning friends aren't creating one job. Not one. They are shedding jobs. They are learning to do more with fewer employees. They are creating high-tech businesses that don't need employees. And many business owners are making plans to leave the country. In a high-tech world where businesses can be run from anywhere, Obama has a problem. His one-trick pony -- raise taxes, raise taxes, raising taxes -- is chasing away the business owners he desperately needs to pay his bills. . . .
For less color, but more facts, there is this frightening report from the LA Times:
For the recovery to gain steam, most economists believe small businesses need to be strong enough to hire new workers. But according to one measure, the employment picture in this sector is weakening.
Intuit Inc., which provides payroll services for small employers, says the nation's tiniest companies had fewer new hires last month than any time since October.
The data are further evidence of a trend that has had many economists worried for months and intensifies concerns that smaller firms may not be robust enough to help lead the country out of its financial slump. The slowdown in hiring is particularly troublesome, experts say, because small businesses typically hire first during a recovery. A reluctance by little companies to add positions could mean that the big firms, which typically lag behind, will add jobs even more gradually.
"It's a bad sign," said Susan Woodward, an economist who tracks small business employment for Intuit. "Small businesses hire first — and they're losing their steam."
To calculate its estimate of national hiring, Intuit uses payroll information from its 56,000 small-business customers. The company defines small businesses as those with fewer than 20 employees.
Intuit's data show that small businesses hired just 18,000 additional workers last month. That's still positive territory, but it's less than a third of the 60,000 that were added in February, when it seemed that an employment recovery was imminent. Additional hiring dropped steadily during the spring, to 40,000 in April and 32,000 in May. Another payroll company, Automatic Data Processing Inc., painted an even gloomier picture, saying that small businesses lost 1,000 jobs nationwide in June. . . .
Robert Alva, who owns Super Cool Air Conditioning in South El Monte, said he's been trying for months to expand his four-person shop to about 10 people to break into the potentially lucrative business of installing solar energy systems. But customers are reluctant to buy new cooling systems right now or even repair their old ones, he said. Whereas he would normally be able to finance a modest expansion by obtaining a loan, Alva said, he's been turned down twice for a small-business loan — squeezed by the credit crunch that has affected thousands of small firms.
To understand the oversized importance of these little businesses to the U.S. jobs picture, consider that the smallest firms — those with fewer than 20 employees — employ more than one-sixth of the nation's workers. But so far this year, these companies have provided about one-third of all new private-sector jobs, said Brian Headd, an economist with the Small Business Administration. So any cutbacks would be felt disproportionately throughout the economy.
"Small-business hiring is right at the heart of it because small businesses usually are the engine of job creation in the U.S.," said John Challenger, president of the employment consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. "It's small businesses that drive the unemployment rate down, and if the small businesses are faltering, that suggests that the risks of recession are growing." . . .
As I pointed out in prior posts, Obama has done anything but help businesses generally or small business in particular. Every one of his goals for America, from Obamacare to cap and trade to a complete revamp of our financial regulations, involve vast increases in costs, both to individuals and businesses. And as to small businesses, well, Obama pays little beyond lip service. Of the $787 billion Stimulus, only 2.6% was earmarked to help with small business loans. The vast majority of the remainder was wasted subsidizing profligate state governments and public union employees for a year.
Which brings us to a final point. In the Depression of the 1930's, there were two schools of thought as to how to handle a deathly sick economy. One, that of John Maynard Keynes - and beloved of the budding socialists then and now - suggested that massive government spending was necessary to stimulate the economy and restore confidence. The second school of thought, that of Friedrich Von Hayek, was that the government needed to limit spending and reduce or remove regulations that stifled private sector growth and inhibited trade. Indeed, you can find dueling letters between Keynes and Hayek, setting forth their positions, printed in the 1932 newspaper, The Times.
The question of who was correct was never definitively answered at the time. FDR adopted the Keynesian approach, but we were still in the grips of the depression in 1941 when World War II intervened and solved the problem of double digit unemployment. Most economists agree that it was WWII that drove the end of the depression. So today, the question remains, what should we be doing to treat an economy in deep distress.
Clearly, Obama, like FDR before him, has followed Keynes, at least partly. Obama counted on the massive government stimulus - and Bush's TARP - to put the economy well on the road to recovery, projecting that unemployment would top out below 8% and then recede. But he also did something else that Keynes clearly never supported. Obama has attacked confidence in our economy by promising ever greater spending and taxes and by attacking the private sector and the profit motive.
On the other hand, there is economist Arthur Laffer. He recently wrote an artice in the WSJ taking Crazy Nancy to task for her wildly false assertion that funding yet another extension of unemployment benefits (on even more borrowed money - the left refuses to pay for it with existing borrowed funds) is the best way stimulate the economy and create new jobs. Indeed, even without an explanation from Dr. Laffer, the fact that extending such benefits hasn't worked for two years now ought to be a clue that Crazy Nancy is either being disingenuous or that she is clinically insane (I, in all honesty, think she is both). At the conclusion of his article, Laffer writes:
Any government program that would reduce unemployment has to make working more attractive for both employer and employee. Since late 2007 the federal government has spent somewhere around $3.6 trillion to stimulate the economy. That is a lot of money.
My suggestion would have been to take all $3.6 trillion and declare a federal tax holiday for 18 months. No income tax, no corporate profits tax, no capital gains tax, no estate tax, no payroll tax (FICA) either employee or employer, no Medicare or Medicaid taxes, no federal excise taxes, no tariffs, no federal taxes at all, which would have reduced federal revenues by $2.4 trillion annually. Can you imagine where employment would be today? How does a 2.5% unemployment rate sound
Interestingly, Laffer is a bit between Hayek and Keynes. He would use government revenues to ease the burden on the private sector.
I happen to agree wholeheartedly with Laffer. Whether Laffer is right will likely be a question argued in the halls of academia many years into the future. But in any event, what is quite clear today is is that a pure Keyesian answer to the problem, as instituted with an Obama twist, has proven a disaster. And it seems, to me at least, that he will lead us into a true depression if allowed to continue on his current path.
An e-mail was sent to me that is making the rounds in the UK. It applies equally as well on this side of the pond - and although the list of new taxes is different, it is no less applicable:
The next time you hear a politician use the word 'billion' in a casual manner, think about whether you want the 'politicians' spending YOUR tax money.
A billion is a difficult number to comprehend, but one advertising agency did a good job of putting that figure into some perspective in one of its releases.
- A billion seconds ago it was 1959.
- A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive.
- A billion hours ago our ancestors were living in the Stone Age.
- A billion days ago no-one walked on the earth on two feet.
- A billion Pounds ago was only 13 hours and 12 minutes, at the rate our government is spending it.
* Stamp Duty * Tobacco Tax * Corporate Income Tax * Income Tax * Council Tax * Unemployment Tax * Fishing License Tax * Petrol/Diesel Tax * Inheritance Tax (tax on top of tax) * Alcohol Tax * V.A.T. * Marriage License Tax * Property Tax * Service charge taxes * Social Security Tax * Vehicle License Registration Tax * Vehicle Sales Tax * Workers Compensation Tax
Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago...and our nation was one of the most prosperous in the world.
We had absolutely no national debt...
we had the largest middle class in the world... and Mum stayed home to raise the kids.
At a time when the left has swung the pendulum hard to the left in both the UK and the US, at a time when the electorate of both US and UK appears poised for a massive move to the right, the "conservative" parties - the Tories in the UK, the Republicans in the U.S. - seem far from up to the task. When we need Churchill and Reagan, we instead have leaders in the mold of Clement Attlee and Herbert Hoover. The problem is particularly acute in the UK.
In the post below, I address the problems of the UK and its "conservative party." By comparison, our problems in the U.S. are not as dire as those of Britain's, largely because our democracy is much more representative than is their's. Yet in some ways, our problems are not dissimilar. In both countries, the left has pushed our nation's so far to the left that the economies and the very fabric of our societies are threatened. Further, today, neither in the UK nor in the U.S. is there a sufficiently strong leader on the right to stem the tide. For the UK, four weeks from their next election, that fact is disastrous. For we in the U.S., it is not yet at that point given that we are about two years out from having to decide who will be the Republican nominee. Yet the problems that they will face will be every bit as daunting as those faced in the UK:
- Between massive deficit spending and out of control entitlement programs, our economy is approaching a potentially existential crisis:
The U.S. government has $12.5 trillion of funded debt, almost 90% of last year’s GDP. That is a critical level according to Reinhart and Rogoff based on their 800-year study of sovereign bankruptcies. Serious, funded debt is not the major problem. Unfunded entitlements (Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid) are. These are estimated to be $106 trillion.
And still Obama continues a world record spending spree.
- the war on business has resulted in persistent and staggering unemployment in America. "The U-6 unemployment number . . . is at 17.5%, within 0.5% of its all-time high. This figure includes discouraged workers who've stopped looking, marginally attached workers, and workers that are forced to work part-time because full-time jobs are not available."
- the enactment of Obamacare portends to only worsen our fiscal crisis while doing nothing to alleviate the severe crises posed by are already existing entitlement programs - Social Security, Medicare, Medicade and S-CHIP to name but a few.
- Public sector unions, only allowed in America since the days of JFK, are a toxin in America. They have perverse incentives to push for bigger government and higher taxes and they operate unchecked by market forces. They degrade performance in every aspect of the government where they exist and are a particular problem in education. The average public sector union worker now makes significantly more than their private sector counterparts - and they are destroying state and local economies with massive unfunded pension liabilities.
- Regulatory burdens, particularly in the area of environmentalism where the left has handed the keys to the courthouse to the radical greens, with untold costs to our economy. Moreover, in a move that bypasses Congressional refusal to enact cap and trade, the EPA recently announced that they will begin regulating carbon - in what portends to be a significant cost to our economy.
- Proposed regulatory changes to our financial structure that will place significantly greater racially charged lending standards on our financial institutions, despite the fact that this same degradation of lending standards led in large part to our current financial meltdown.
- The left continues to feed the race baiting industry beyond long after we passed any rational justification. It is time to bring an end to affirmative action as well as any and all use of the disparate impact theory to punish entities for racism despite no evidence of any act of racism. It should be noted that Obama wants to expand the disparate impact theory as part of the new financial regulations.
- our Courts are regularly legislating from the bench, reinterpreting Constitutional provisions in a manner far outside of the original intent of the drafters to bypass the ballot box on contentious social issues, ripping at the fabric of our nation. We could really use a Constitutional Amendment on this issue to provide some guidance to the Courts on how to execute their Article III duties.
All of the above are simply domestic problems - and the last two our my own issues that are not as pressing as the rest, but that do need to be addressed as part of a radical reorientation of our domestic polity. None of this even begins to touch upon the problems Obama and the left are causing in foreign policy.
Whoever is to tackle all of these problems in a decisive manner will have to be highly intelligent, articulate, and sufficiently driven by internalized conservative idealism to withstand the type of massive assault in the left wing MSM that will come with applying conservative solutions to the above problems - many of which will of necessity mean reorienting America away from the left wing path it has been on since at least FDR. Moreover, we are going to need a reorientation that has as its absolute focus the growth of businesses of all size - we are in a hole where the only answer to both our deficit and our undemployment problem is to grow ourselves out of both. Do we have a leader that strong on the horizon to accomplish all of these things?
Perhaps we do. I think New Gingrich fits that bill. I would also watch closely Paul Ryan and Chris Christie. I think all others are a level below these three in intellect, if not also in the intestinal fortitude needed to lead the type of radical reorientation our nation needs to survive, let alone to remain as first among equals.
Newt Gingrich - He is an absolutely brilliant man and a highly articulate speaker. Compliments of the MSM smear machine in the 1990's, many in the left and center have negative views of Gingrich, though it is doubtful those general views are today sufficiently strongly held to disqualify him from making a run. Of all the potential candidates, I would think him most qualified and the most likely to be able to address the many problems of our country itemized above.
Paul Ryan - I do not know enough about him yet to put a gold star next to his name, but his performance during the televised dog and pony shows with Obama have shown him to be articulate and in possession of a first class intellect. It is also notable that he is the only one, of all the Republicans in Congress, to actually publish an alternative to Obamacare. He is one to further evaluate.
Chris Christie - This man impresses ever more on a daily basis. He faces many of the problems in governing New Jersey that our nation faces on a grander scale. He is demonstrating daily a strong intellect and an even more impressive hard as nails approach to the problems of New Jersey. If he succeeds in turning around New Jersey in any cognizant fashion, he will definitely be a person to watch - if not in the 2012 election, then in 2016 and beyond. He has already demonstrated the combativeness and cajones necessary to push through the radical reorientation our country needs and he, unlike George Bush and much of the Republican Party, has also shown a willingness to push back hard against the smears of the left.
Then there are the lessers and the long shots:
Sarah Palin - as much as I like her, I don't see her as sufficiently rounded to make a run for the Presidency. I think her decision to give up her governership not even half way through her term was fatal to a bid for 2012. Perhaps in 2016 she might have a chance.
Mitt Romney - His claim to fame was his economic smarts. But the simple fact is that he designedObamacare for Massachusetts. Either his economic smarts are vastly over-rated or this man is an incredibly cynical political opportunist. Regardless which, we can afford neither in office beyond 2012, and thus I won't be pulling a lever for him under any circumstances.
Mike Huckabee - his foreign policy views were what turned me against him during the last primary and nothing since has occurred since that would lead me to believe that he has gained strength in that area. That said, I do like his Fox shows.
Ron Paul - I would vote for Obama before I would vote for Paul. He really is a few McNuggets short of a Happy Meal.
Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty - I do not know enough about him at this point to make a decision on Pawlenty. I have heard him speak a few times and have not walked away with either a positive or negative impression. Perhaps that itself says all that needs to be said.
We will see who rises to the top over the next year. The other critical issue will be gaining conservatives in sufficient numbers in Congress. At any point in my lifetime, I would not have thought that possible. But today, given the path to the far left Obama is pushing us and the strength of the Tea Party movement - I now think it very possible.
According to Entertainment Weekly, David Letterman's interview with grandmother and local tea party leader Pam Stout gave the "Tea Party The Best Showcase Its Ever Had." And I have to agree. Ms. Stout is a matronly 66 yr. old former business woman and naturalized American. She currently presides over the local Tea Party in her area in Idaho. She is as articulate, simple and sincere a woman as you'll ever see.
Letterman kept a light touch throughout the interview, though he did bring his own biases into the interview - Obama's birth certificate, anti-Iraq war, anti-Glen Beck, the claim of Republican fiscal mismanagement - and to each, Ms. Stout's answers were quite good, never backing down and explaining her positions with grace and clarity. Do enjoy this one. Also note the tepid applause at her introduction and the louder applause at the interviews conclusion.
As the Entertainment Weekly author notes
Except nobody else is doing interviews with people like this on TV. Why is it that the most interesting questioning of political issues is still being done not on network news shows, but rather by people like Letterman, Jon Stewart, and Craig Ferguson?
I think that answer is self-evident. The left wants the face of the Tea Party to be Bull Connor. Under no circumstances do they want the general public associating the Tea Party movement with a Pam Stout.
A bit of catch up blogging. Talk about your admission against interest - not that it was anything we didn't know already.
In one sense, this is a bipartisan message. Certainly our cast of Republicans in Congress spent our money like drunken sailors when they controlled the purse strings, and its why their base let them hang in 2006. But they aren't even in the same league as Democrats, who make any analogy to drunken sailors grossly inaccurate in as much as it does not begin to capture their capacity for profligacy.
It is also a full and complete explanation of how Obama and the left could pass Obamacare in the face of a massive fiscal crisis and a national debt that threatens the stability of our nation. They simply choose to ignore it and keep rooting at the trough.
This also means that there is a fundamental and systemic failure in our body politic that, if not fixed, bodes an ill wind indeed for the future of our country.
Fortune Magazine has a good article on Rep. Paul Ryan - a Congressman who recently arrived on the national stage with his articulate criticism of Obama's health care plans. The article discusses Ryan's economic plans to put America back on a sound - and sane - fiscal footing.:
What is the Ryan plan , and why is the Obama administration seemingly obsessed with it? Ryan calls his proposal, published in January, the Roadmap for America's Future. It's a remarkably comprehensive, daring manifesto that tackles every part of the budget on a presidential scale, from Social Security to tax policy to health-care reform.
The goal is to eliminate the deficit, and eventually all federal debt, without any crippling tax increases. Under Ryan's plan, for example, federal spending would reach just 24% of GDP in 2035 and then fall, vs. the CBO's projection of 34% and rising from there. Ryan would make the deficit disappear by mid-century. . . .
Do read the whole article. Ryan, like Chris Christie, are people to watch as the Dems promise to lead us down an insane fiscal path - until 2012.
But the "steady" figure of 9.7% unemployment itself hid more problems. The work force actually contracted yet again in February, losing a net of 36,000 more jobs. Perhaps more importantly, the Labor Dept.'s "broader measure of unemployment and underemployment rose to 16.8% last month, from 16.5% in January." Tom Blumer of Bizzyblogdigs deeper into the numbers and finds even more to be pessimistic about.
Were this a typical recession, we would have begun pulling out of it some time ago. We should already be seeing a return to normal employment levels. We are not because Obama is not working to restore America, he is working to remake it. Between health care, regulation of carbon, and a reworking of our financial regulations, Obama portends to work a sea change to America, with the federal government expanding its power over every aspect of society. And as Blumer points out, quoting a Heritage Foundation article, all of this has businesses hanging back:
The reason our unemployment rate is so much higher now is low job creation, not high job loss. So why aren’t businesses creating jobs?
■ At one of President Obama’s many jobs summits, Fred Lampropoulos told The New York Times that businesses were uncertain about investment because “there’s such an aggressive legislative agenda that businesspeople don’t really know what they ought to do.” That uncertainty, he added, “is really what’s holding back the jobs.”
■ Dan DiMicco, CEO of steelmaker Nucor Corp, told the Wall Street Journal: “Companies large and small are saying, ‘I am not going to do anything until these things — health care, climate legislation — go away or are resolved.’”
■ Porta-King CEO Steve Schulte told USA Today his company is not investing because “proposals in Congress to tackle climate change and overhaul health care would raise costs.”
■ The New York Post’s Charles Gasparino reported on the 600 companies stock analyst Peter Sidoti covers: “‘There hasn’t been one bankruptcy,’ he tells me. How did they survive the recession? By cutting costs and hoarding cash, not expanding their business and hiring more people, even as the economy now is starting to recover. During other recoveries, Sidoti says, firms like these would be hiring workers in droves as demand picks up for goods and services. This time around, they’re not — because ‘they don’t know what their costs are going to be.’” . . .
Unfortunately for America, Obama's efforts to rework our health care system ostensibly for economic reasons portends to be counterproductive on an insane scale. As Paul Ryan points out here, Obama's plan does nothing to bend down the curve of health care costs, and it understates by more than half what this monster will cost our country. As Krauthammer writes today, if Obama was truly concerned with the economic aspects of health care, then the single most important step he could undertake to bend down the cost curve of health care expenses would be to engage in tort reform. But Obama's health care plan is not about economics, it is about the accretion of power:
. . . Among the few Republican suggestions President Obama pretended to incorporate was tort reform. What did he suggest to address the plague of defensive medicine that a Massachusetts Medical Society study showed leads to about 25 percent of doctor referrals, tests and procedures being done for no medical reason? A few ridiculously insignificant demonstration projects amounting to one-half of one-hundredth of 1 percent of the cost of his health-care bill. . . .
It should also be noted that the CBO came out today with revised projections showing that, with Obama's massive spending, we can expect add a trillion dollars annually to our budget deficit over the next decade. This exceeds Obama's own ten year estimate by $1.2 trillion over ten years. It will mean a deficit in a decade that is near ten times the deficit left by the Bush administration and will top 20% or our GDP. Those are numbers that would make Robert Mugabe sit up nights worrying.
Lastly, there is Obama's latest plan to tax our financial institutions as a sort of punishment. Obama is selling this risible idea on a class warfare platform. As any student of Econ 101 could tell you, taxes on businesses get passed through to consumers to the maximum extent possible and, to the extent that they don't get passed on, then they manifest in other negative consequences for our economy. Today, the CBO actually has come out to explain it for those who are economically illiterate. This from Hot Air:
This only comes as news to people who haven’t worked in the private sector, of course — which means the entirety of the Obama administration and most of the Democratic leadership in Congress. It takes a CBO analysis for them to understand that increasing costs on businesses means increasing costs on their customers — or forcing them out of business altogether. This time, the CBO explains the impact of raising fees on financial institutions to the clueless:
President Obama’s proposed fee on the country’s biggest banks receiving taxpayer bailout money would ultimately result in costs to the firms’ customers, employees, and investors, a non-partisan Congressional watchdog said today. … But the Congressional Budget Office today warned that “the ultimate cost of a tax or fee is not necessarily borne by the entity that writes the check to the government.”
“The cost of the proposed fee would ultimately be borne to varying degrees by an institution’s customers, employees, and investors,” the CBO said today in a letter to Sen. Chuck Grassley.
“Customers would probably absorb some of the cost in the form of higher borrowing rates and other charges, although competition from financial institutions not subject to the fee would limit the extent to which the cost could be passed to borrowers. Employees might bear some of the cost by accepting some reduction in their compensation, including income from bonuses, if they did not have better employment opportunities available to them. Investors could bear some of the cost in the form of lower prices of their stock if the fee reduced the institution’s future profits.”
The availability of credit – already a problem for some consumers and businesses – could also be limited by the proposed fee, the CBO said. . . .
Obama is leading us into economic oblivion at a sprint. The question in 2012 will be whether it is even possible to reverse the damage. Conservatives used to say tongue in cheek that Obama'sinauguration would begin Carter's second term. If only . . .
On most things of consequence, the gulf between Obama'swords and his deeds is large indeed. But few are so obvious and blatant as listening to Obama demonize lobbyists in the State of the Union Speech only to see his administration on the next day inviting the lobbyists to a private meeting to "discuss issues raised in Obama's speech." This from the Hill:
A day after bashing lobbyists, President Barack Obama’s administration has invited K Street insiders to join private briefings on a range of topics addressed in Wednesday’s State of the Union.
The Treasury Department on Thursday morning invited selected individuals to “a series of conference calls with senior Obama administration officials to discuss key aspects of the State of the Union address.” . . .
This is getting comical.
On a related note, the AP fact checked Obama's speech, finding several questionable Presidential claims. They include
- Obama seeks a freeze on certain items of discretionary spending as a means to lower out out of control deficits. The AP notes that, while Obama made this the centerpiece of his new pose as a fiscal hawk, Obama neglected to mention that, even if fully enacted, his plan will only cut the budget deficit by 1% in ten years. AP doesn't go far enough, though. The reality is that Obama and the Dems already raised discretionary spending by 25% last year, so freezing such spending at current levels is kind of like cutting off the alcohol only after the patrons are already drunk.
- The AP opines that Obama's call for a "bi-partisan" commission to recommend changes to the economy will be "toothless." That said, the AP ignores that this was always about politics rather than fixing the economy. The left wants to tax us so that they can continue to spend. Congress is required by the Constitution to make all binding decisions on taxing and spending. The only reason to toss up a "bi-partisan commission" to duplicate this function is to protect Congressional Democrats - to give them some cover for their decisions. It is not exactly a portrait in moral courage.
- As to Obama's health care claim that "[o]ur approach would preserve the right of Americans who have insurance to keep their doctor and their plan," AP gives a post speech shout out of "you lie."
- As to Obama's claims regarding two million jobs saved by the stimulus, the AP notes that there is reason for cynicism. What the AP does not note is that even of the jobs claimed, they are virtually all in the public sector, with a few in heavily subsidised "green jobs" that could not exist in the private sector without government largess. They will fade away the moment the government tit drys up. Update: Gateway Pundit runs to ground Obama's claim of the Phoenix "small business" that is tripling its work force thanks to the stimulus. It is Ecotality, owned by a Democratic donor whose company received $100 million in stimulus funds - for which it added 27 jobs in 2009 and is planning on adding another 15 in 2010. That is well over a $2 million per job. So do you feel stimulated yet?
- Obama shamelessly repeated his calls for "transparency" in government - after giving us a year of the least transparent government in decades. Even hard core Obamiacs had to be doing the face-palm on that one.
- As the AP lastly notes, Obama claimed to have killed far more alQaeda members than the Bushies did in 2008. But, AP points out, this is a claim that is impossible to verify. They also note that drone attacks, which are likely the basis for the claim, "increased dramatically in the last 18 months." Hmmmm, let's see, eighteen minus twelve . . . . what do you know - the increase started on Bush's watch. So Obama's claim to being superior to Bush in the war on terror is predicated on . . . carrying on a Bush policy.
There were a lot of false or unverifiable claims made by Obama last night that the AP missed. Hot Air notes that Obama's blame of Bush for the deficits is one. Another is Obama claiming credit for "ending" the war in Iraq. It mystifies me that any commander of U.S. troops could sit stone-faced listening to that one. And then there was Obama's claim that the recent Supreme Court decision in Citizen's United would open up the flood gates for foreign influence in our elections when the reality is that the laws pertaining to foreign money in campaigns were explicitly left untouched by the Supreme Court in the Citizens United decision.
The message of Massachusetts has clearly passed right over the head of our President without even stopping for a moment to sojourn between his rather prodigious ears. According to Obama, the problem is not that any of his massive assaults on our economy are at the heart of the Mass. rebellion, but rather it has been his inability to properly explain his programs - and that, Obama tells us, is because he has been too busy. This from the Washington Post:
Obama said the relentless pursuit of his domestic policies -- and a failure to adequately explain their virtues -- had left Americans with a "feeling of remoteness and detachment" from the flurry of government actions in Washington.
"We were so busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of us that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values," he told ABC's George Stephanopoulos.
Obama has appeared on our screens so often the past year that he practically has his own weekly time slot. With the exception of Fox and the WSJ, his coverage has been so favorable and one sided across the entire spectrum of the MSM that it has been near obscene. Indeed, the relationship between the President and NBC/MSNBC news crews has been such that I am amazed that none of the members of those crews have yet to come down with e-coli infections. And still, Obama thinks his problem is an inability to get the benefits of his plans favorably across to the public?
And do note Obama's choice of words - "speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are . . ." Is there any way to interpret that other than that Obama feels we need his assistance to identify and define our "core" American values? Could that be any more offensive? This man's arrogance and condescension are limitless. The only reason he needs to identify these values is because he is attempting to redefine them to comport with his socialist world view -a view that he recasts in the words of morality.
And this also from the WaPo article:
The White House had already begun a determined effort to pivot its message to expressions of concern about the economy and jobs as it prepares for congressional midterm elections in November. Tuesday's defeat made that shift in rhetoric even more urgent.
How incompetent must these people be to believe that a single problem we face will be solved, that a single job will be created, that a single drop of energy will be produced, by not more than a change in "rhetoric." I said in an earlier post that, at this point, my perception of Obama is that he is an ideologue - a fanatic. And this proves my point. He is unable to see outside his ideological paradigm. And if the public does not share his beliefs, than there is no thought given to changing his paradigm and plans, but merely to talk more persuasively. Though I suppose this is at least an inch in the right direction. It was only last week that Obama was yet again blaming Bush for the economy and, in an added twist, blaming Republicans for obstructionism - when Democrats have held a supermajority in Congress for the past year. This man is drowning.
Karl Rove, writing in the WSJ, weighed in today on the fiscal mess Obama has charted for us during his first year in office:
. . . Mr. Axelrod wrote that no one is entitled to his own facts, even as he argued that George W. Bush is responsible for Barack Obama's deficits. He argued that Mr. Bush forced the hand of this administration by leaving office in the midst of a sharp recession.
That argument won't fly for two reasons. First, at some point this administration has to take responsibility for itself. It's also not even close to accurate. Consider that from Jan. 20, 2001, to Jan. 20, 2009, the debt held by the public grew $3 trillion under Mr. Bush—to $6.3 trillion from $3.3 trillion at a time when the national economy grew as well.
By comparison, from the day Mr. Obama took office last year to the end of the current fiscal year, according to the Office of Management and Budget, the debt held by the public will grow by $3.3 trillion. In 20 months, Mr. Obama will add as much debt as Mr. Bush ran up in eight years.
Mr. Obama's spending plan approved by Congress last February calls for doubling the national debt in five years and nearly tripling it in 10.
Mr. Bush's deficits ran an average of 3.2% of GDP, slightly above the post World War II average of 2.7%. Mr. Obama's plan calls for deficits that will average 4.2% over the next decade.
Team Obama has been on history's biggest spending spree, which has included a $787 billion stimulus, a $30 billion expansion of a child health-care program, and a $410 billion federal spending bill that increased nondefense discretionary spending 10% for the last half of fiscal year 2009. Mr. Obama also hiked nondefense discretionary spending another 12% for fiscal year 2010.
Mr. Bush did move to give voters more control over their tax dollars. Both his Social Security reform ideas and the drug program he created offered templates for driving federal spending curves in the right direction, counter to what Democrats wanted to do.
Democrats, for example, proposed creating a prescription drug program as an alternative to the one Mr. Bush proposed that would have cost a projected $800 billion over 10 years. The Bush drug benefit was originally expected to cost half that amount and today costs a third less than what it was initially expected to cost because it uses market forces to drive prices down.
Mr. Axelrod claims the pork-laden stimulus package has been a success. But Mr. Obama told Americans that if it were passed, unemployment wouldn't rise above 8%. It is now 10%. The president also said it would create 3.7 million jobs, 90% of which would be in the private sector. By Mr. Obama's standards, the stimulus failed miserably.
Mr. Bush did sign the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) into law and loaned $240 billion to banks. But those loans are being returned at a profit to the Treasury. Rather than using those funds to pay down the deficit, Mr. Obama wants to use them for new spending. What's more, he has lavished some $320 billion from TARP on car companies, union allies, and pet causes that will never be fully returned.
Mr. Axelrod boasts Mr. Obama's proposed health reforms will "not add to the federal deficit." But if that turns out to be true, it will only be because Massachusetts voters just elected a senator who promises to vote against those reforms.
In going after Mr. Bush's fiscal record, Mr. Axelrod unwittingly revealed why Democrats are losing. Mr. Obama and congressional Democrats have made a mess of the nation's finances and are desperate to pin the blame on someone else. It's not likely to work.
Even in deep blue Massachusetts, voters aren't standing idly by while the administration puts the nation on a dangerous trajectory. When Democrats lose a state they carried by 26 points a little more than a year ago, very little is safe for Mr. Obama's party this fall.
Obama has floated another smoke and mirrors plan to address the deficit, even as it is he and his party that are driving up the spending and deficit. That plan would essentially move responsibility for taxing and spending out of Congress and put it into the hands of a partisan-weighted commission. This commission would do nothing more than duplicate the work that Congress already does in committee. How an extra layer of duplicativebureaucracy will be a panacea for our economic ill is not at once obvious. This from WaPo:
Under the agreement, President Obama would issue an executive order to create an 18-member panel that would be granted broad authority to propose changes in the tax code and in the massive federal entitlement programs -- including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security -- that threaten to drive the nation's debt to levels not seen since World War II. . . .
The commission is likely to form the centerpiece of Democrats' efforts to reduce projected budget deficits, which have soared into record territory in the aftermath of the worst recession in a generation. Government spending to bail out the troubled financial sector and to stimulate economic activity have combined with sagging tax collections to push last year's budget deficit to a record $1.4 trillion. The budget gap is projected to be just as large this year and to hover close to $1 trillion a year for much of the next decade. . . .
. . . House leaders are insisting, however, that they will not go along with the commission's creation unless the Senate does approve stringent pay-as-you-go budget rules, an outcome that is far from certain. Such rules, which helped produce budget surpluses under President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s, bar lawmakers from approving legislation that increases the deficit.
That last paragraph is so wrong on so many levels. For one, the Clinton surpluses came not from pay-as-you-go rules, but by changing Social Security into a ponzi scheme, with excess Soc. Sec. receipts being transferred to our general funds and spent annually by Congress. Two, the House legislation for "pay as you go" contains massive loop holes for deficit spending for all of Obama's economy killing socialist plans. Three, the only substantive effect that the House legislation would really have would be to permanently end the use of tax cuts to stimulate the economy. The President is certainly capable of submitting a budget that reduces deficits. The House and Senate are certainly capable of passing balanced budgets without a new "pay as you go" law. But then again, the purpose of the pay as you go law is not deficit reduction or balanced budgets, its propaganda, smoke and mirrors, and tying the hands of Republicans to enact tax cuts.
At any rate, it is clear that the loss of bluest of blue Massachusetts has not resulted in Obama learning a thing. That is a very dark cloud with a bright silver lining. It is horrifying for what it means Obama will attempt over the next 11 months, and yet it is gratifying for what it means the voting public will do in the 11th month.
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